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Throttling and Blocking Users

Introduction

• In February 2023 we introduced an enhancement to MESHdesk and APdesk that allows you to throttle or block selected WiFi clients.
• Sometimes the need arise to block a specified user on the WiFi network without disrupting the other users who are also connected. With this enhancement it can be done in a snap.
• With capped LTE products there is a risk of using 'to much' data when using streaming services like YouTube. A few mouse clicks allow you to put a speed limit on WiFi clients in order to quickly and effectively reduce their data consumption.

Blocking Junior's friend

• Nothing like a real life example.
• So Junior's friend came over and they were going to do some gaming.
• Junior's friend is a nice guy but the laptop he came with looks a bit dodgy.
• Soon after he connects to the WiFi the other siblings started with the Daddy the WiFi is broken drill.

• Now we can try our new feature out to block the chap.
• We go to MESHdesk; select our mesh network and click the view icon.

• Note that the top user is a MAC Address we have not yet give a name to. We can safely assume it must be the dodgy laptop.
• Click on the Pencil Icon in the heading bar of Top 10 Devices to pop-up the Alias for MAC Address window.
• After you created the alias for the device; click on Block Device (far right icon) in the heading bar to pop up the Block MAC Address window.
• Since our suspicion about the laptop seems to be valid we will go to the extreme and add a Cloud Wide block.

• Note we will have a visual indication of the devices that are throttled or blocked.

Slowing Junior Down

• We got a nice Internet deal from one of our mobile providers with a capped month to month product.
• Unfortunately since the LTE Connection is good some of the streaming sites Junior visits are opportunistic and streams had a high resolution which in turns deplete our data cap even before the month is over.
• Since we are pro-active we select all the kids devices and apply a speed limit to them.

• Again notice that we have a visual indication of the speed limit and also how much it is on those devices that are limited.

Speed test results

• Speedtest with no speed limit applied

• Speedtest with 1Mbps Upload and 1Mbps Download speed limit applied

Technical Details

• If you are an old hand with Linux you are probably very familiar with iptables.
• In the old days firewalls were done using iptables and in case you needed to do packet management on layer two you would use ebtables.
• Fast forward to today and we have the much more advanced and user friendly nftables.
• nftables allows you to do packet management on layer three or layer two.
• OpenWrt version 22.03 migrated to use nftables instead of iptables.
• We took the opportunity to take advantage of this improvement with our per device block and speed limit feature.
• This means that the feature will require OpenWrt version 22.03 or higher based firmware to work correct.
• Another feature which desitinguesh